Leeds Beckett University - City Campus,
Woodhouse Lane,
LS1 3HE
Alice Cliff Scatcherd (1842 - 1906)
Mill Hill congregation member
Early life
Born in Wortley, Alice was the seventh of fourteen children born to Joseph Cliff and Alice Dewhirst. Although she was born into a wealthy Unitarian family, Alice was educated at The Mount School in York, a Quaker organisation that Alice would maintain close links with for the rest of her life.
In 1871 she married Oliver Scatcherd on October 3rd and, notably for the time, she did not promise to ‘obey’ Oliver and followed the Quaker custom of not wearing a wedding ring. She is recorded as saying that marriage ‘did much to keep up the subjection of women in our land’ and argued that marriage ‘lends the sanction of religion to much that is degrading and wrong in married life’ (Pemberton Joss, n.d.).
Political life
A year after her marriage, Alice joined the Leeds Ladies Educational Association, and eventually joined the new Leeds branch of the National Society for Women’s Suffrage and soon after was appointed as a committee member. Meetings for this society were held in schools, halls, libraries, the homes of supporters and even Mechanic’s institutes.
A page from the Women’s Suffrage Journal dated April 2nd 1877 listed Alice as a speaker in Macclesfield with Lydia Becker in March of the same year; in her work as a campaigner, Cliff Scatcherd aimed to expand the suffrage movement to include reform in both divorce and child custody laws.
Following the change of name to the Yorkshire Society for Women’s Suffrage and merging with the Manchester Society, by 1877 Alice was elected as a member of the executive committee, a role she held until 1885. It was during this time that Alice Cliff Scatcherd would have met and worked alongside prominent figures in the women’s suffrage movement such as Emmeline and Richard Pankhurst, Elizabeth Clarke Wolstenholme Elmy and Ursula Bright. She would have worked alongside Richard Pankhurst and Herbert Newman Mozley on the Married Women’s Property Act which successfully passed into law in the 1880s.
In 1905 Oliver Scatcherd passed away, and after spending her final year bedridden, Alice passed away on Christmas Eve 1906. Following her request, her funeral was carried out by the minister of Mill Hill Chapel before being interred in the Scatcherd family mausoleum in Morley.
Alice Cliff Scatchered (seated on the left) at a meeting of the Manchester Women's Suffrage Branch.
Bibliography
- Becker, L.E. (1877). Public Meetings. Women’s Suffrage Journal, 8(86), p.49.
- Holton, Sandra Stanley (2002) Suffrage Days. London: Routledge.
- Joss, Vine Pemberton (2019) The Vote Before The Vote. Accessed 27 March 2024.
- Wright, M. (2013). Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy and the Victorian Feminist Movement. Manchester University Press.
